REPORT ON THE CURRENT STATUS OF
UNITED NATIONS ROMANIZATION SYSTEMS FOR GEOGRAPHICAL NAMES
Compiled by the UNGEGN Working Group on Romanization Systems
Version 2.2, January 2003

Burmese

No romanization systems for Burmese have been put forward at the United Nations conferences on the standardization of geographical names or at sessions of the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names. Currently there is no official system of romanization in Myanmar. In 1989 the government of Myanmar changed the spellings of the names of several cities in Myanmar to bring them closer to Burmese pronunciation but this was done on an ad hoc basis (Government of the Union of Myanmar Notification 5/89. Eighth United Nations Conference on the Standardization of Geographical Names, Berlin, 27 August – 5 September 2002. Document E/CONF.94/INF.75.).

The only known romanization system of Burmese is that of the BGN and the PCGN (1970) which is based on the 1907 version of the Tables for the Transliteration of Burmese into English, published in 1908 by the Office of the Superintendent, Government Printing, Rangoon, Burma.

Burmese uses an alphasyllabic script. The romanization is not reversible to its original script form.

System of romanization

The BGN/PCGN 1970 System is given below.

I. Consonant characters

1	က	kaA
2	ခ	kaA
3	ဂ	ga
4	ဃ	ga
5	င	nga
6	စ	saA
7	ဆ	saA
8	ဇ	za
9	ဈ	za
10	ည	nyaB
11	ဋ	taA
12	ဌ	taA
13	ဍ	da
14	ဎ	da
15	ဏ	na
16	တ	taA
17	ထ	taA
18	ဒ	da
19	ဓ	da
20	န	na
21	ပ	paA
22	ဖ	paA
23	ဗ	ba
24	ဘ	ba
25	မ	ma
26	ယ	ya
27	ရ	ya
28	လ	la
29	ဝ	wa
30	သ	thaC
31	ဟ	ha
32	ဠ	la
33	အ	aD

• ^A See note 1.
• ^B Syllable-final variant character: ဥ.
• ^C Syllable-final variant character: သ္သ.
• ^D See note 3.

II. Independent vowel characters (see also note 4)

1	ဣ	i
2	ဤ	i
3	ဥ	u
4	ဦ	u
5	၏	eA
6	ဧ	e
7	ဩ	awB

• ^A This character is actually an abbreviation, a genitive/declarative marker.
• ^B Also used in combination with abbreviated vowel characters: ဩော့, ဪ.

III. Abbreviated vowel characters (က stands for any consonant character)

1	ကံ	an
2	ကာ	aA
3	ကိ	i
4	ကီ	i
5	ကု	uB
6	ကူ	uB
7	ကဲ	è
8	ကော	awA
9	ကော္‌	awA
10	ကုိ	oB
11	ကေ	e

• ^A To avoid graphic confusion with some other characters, ာ and ာ္‌ are lengthened upwards after consonant characters ခ ka, ဂ ga, င nga, ဒ da, ပ pa, and ဝ wa, e.g. ခာ ka, ခော္‌ kaw. After characters ဇ za, ဌ ta, ဓ da, ဖ pa and ဗ ba this practice seems to be optional.
• ^B If in conflict with another subscript symbol, a vowel character ု or ူ may be written after consonant characters, with a prolonged upper part, e.g. က္ယူ kyu, မ္ယုိး myo.

IV. Other symbols (က or မ stands for any consonant character)

1	က္ရ	-yA
2	က္ယ	-yB
3	က္ဝ	-w
4	မ္ဟ	h-C
5	င္က	in-D
6	က္‌	(E)

• ^A Exceptional romanization: ခ္ရ cha (see also note 1).
• ^B Exceptional romanization: ခ္ယ cha (see also note 1).
• ^C Adds h before the consonant, e.g. မ္ဟ hma; exceptional romanization: ရ္ဟ (ဖာ) sha.
• ^D Adds -in to the end of the preceding syllable: ဘင္ဂလားအော္‌ Bin-gala Aw.
• ^E End-of-syllable mark (marks the absence of the inherent vowel).

Symbols 1, 2 and 3 may also occur in combinations: က္ရ္ဝ -yw, က္ယ္ဝ -yw.

V. Syllable endings (က stands for any initial consonant character; syllables beginning with ဝ /w/ may have different romanization equivalents, these are also listed below)

1	ကက္‌	et
2	ကိက္‌	eik
3	ကုက္‌	ôk
4	ကုိက္‌	aik
5	ကောက္‌	auk
6	ကဂ္‌	et
7	ကင္‌	in
8	ကိင္‌	ein
9	ကုိင္‌	aing
10	ကောင္‌	aung
11	ကစ္‌	it
12	ကုစ္‌	ôk
13	ကဇ္‌	it
14	ကိဇ္‌	eik
15	ကည္‌	i, in, eA
16	ကတ္‌	at
17	ကိတ္‌	eik
18	ကုတ္‌	ôk
19	က္ဝတ္‌	ut
20	ဝတ္‌	wut
21	ကေတ္‌	it
22	ကဌ္‌	at
23	ဝဋ္‌	wut
24	ဝဍ္‌	wut
25	ကဒ္‌	at
26	ကိဒ္‌	eik
27	ကုဒ္‌	ôk
28	ကာဒ္‌	at
29	ကဓ္‌	at
30	ကိဓ္‌	eik
31	ကာဓ္‌	at
32	ကန္‌	an
33	ကိန္‌	ein
34	ကုန္‌	ôn
35	က္ဝန္‌	un
36	ဝန္‌	wun
37	ကဏ္‌	an
38	ကိဏ္‌	ein
39	ကုဏ္‌	ôn
40	ကုိဏ္‌	aing
41	ကပ္‌	at
42	ကိပ္‌	eik
43	ကုပ္‌	ôk
44	က္ဝပ္‌	ut
45	ဝာဘ္‌	wut
46	ကမ္‌	an
47	ကိမ္‌	ein
48	ကုမ္‌	ôn
49	က္ဝမ္‌	un
50	ဝမ္‌	wun
51	ကယ္‌	è
52	ကလ္‌	an
53	ကုိလ္‌	aing
54	ကသ္‌	at
55	ကိသ္‌	eik
56	ကဥ္‌	in
57	ကံ	an
58	ကိံ	ein
59	ကုံ	ôn
60	က္ဝံ	un
61	ဝံ	wun
62	ကသ္သ္‌	at

• ^A The choice of romanization depends on the actual pronunciation.

Notes

1. Certain consonant sounds change their value if used after any vowel letter or nasal consonant except as cited in note 5. The changes, as expressed in Roman letters, are the following:
   

   ch	> gy
   k	> g
   p	> b
   s	> z
   t	> d

2. In romanization, -a is always accompanying the Burmese consonant character unless this has got a dependent vowel character or an end-of-syllable mark: မဒမ madama.
3. At the beginning of a word, the character အ should not be romanized, unless followed by a consonant character that does not bear a vowel character or an end-of-syllable mark, in which case the character အ should be romanized a: အကာ aga, but အုိဘဲ့ obè, အပ္‌ at. At the beginning of a medial or final syllable, အ should be rendered by a hyphen: မအူ ma-u, သီးပင္‌အုိင္‌ Thibin-aing.
4. The independent vowel characters should be romanized with a hyphen at the beginning of medial and final syllables: က္ရေဧ kye-e.
5. When two consonant characters are written one above the other without an end-of-syllable mark, the upper character should be romanized first, followed by the lower character, and then the vowel and consonant characters, if any: ပည္ဇ panyza, အန္တိမဘဝ andimabawa. Alternative romanizations, as indicated in note 1, do not apply to the upper character: သေတ္တာ thetta, မိစ္ဆာ missa, ဥက္ကဌ ukkada.
6. When the letter n at the end of a syllable is followed by g or y at the beginning of the next syllable, hyphen should be added in between them; similarly hyphen should be used between t and h if they are in different syllables: အင္‌းက္ဝတ္‌ in-gut (but ဖ္ဝောငန္‌ shwengan).
7. Tone marks ့ and း should not be romanized.